Andrew Varcoe

Partner, Boyden Gray & Associates

Andrew Varcoe is a partner at Boyden Gray & Associates. He has extensive experience with appellate, agricultural, environmental, energy, natural resources, and administrative law matters.

From 2014 to 2017, Mr. Varcoe was Deputy General Counsel for Agriculture and Environment at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), the trade association for the biotechnology industry. He advised the association’s executives, staff, governing bodies, and committees; engaged in and supported advocacy to policymakers and officials; and managed and worked closely with outside counsel on litigation and other projects. His legal practice at BIO focused on environmental law issues and on legal, regulatory, policy, and legislative issues relating to agribusiness and agricultural and industrial biotechnology, including genetically engineered crops and biofuels.

From 2007 to 2014, Mr. Varcoe served as an attorney in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), where he helped manage the Department’s and its agencies’ nationwide appellate litigation docket, working closely with trial and appellate lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice. Mr. Varcoe’s practice at USDA embraced a wide range of administrative law, environmental and natural resources law, and agricultural law matters, as well as issues in the domains of animal health and disease prevention, bankruptcy, civil penalties, crop insurance, employment, fair trade practices, False Claims Act, food regulation and safety, forest management, government lending, intellectual property, mining, permitting and licensing, real property and land use, regulatory compliance, rural development, tort liability, and constitutional law. Mr. Varcoe was particularly involved in major USDA Forest Service and biotechnology cases, including high-profile trial court matters. Mr. Varcoe also briefed, argued, and mediated cases in the federal courts of appeals.

Before joining USDA, Mr. Varcoe was an associate and then counsel at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP (previously Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering), where he was a member of the firm’s litigation department. His practice at the firm involved highly sophisticated litigation, legislative, regulatory, and policy matters for clients in the aerospace and aviation, biotechnology, chemical, defense, energy, financial services and insurance, higher education, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical sectors. He worked on administrative law, bankruptcy, class action, constitutional law, corporate and contract, environmental, health care pricing and Medicare reimbursement, and real estate disputes, as well as EPA and FDA regulatory matters and high-stakes internal investigations. Early in his career, Mr. Varcoe served as a law clerk to Justice Francis X. Spina of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (from 1999 to 2000), and to Judge Edith H. Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (from 2001 to 2002).

Mr. Varcoe received his J.D. cum laude in 1999 from Harvard Law School, where he was a research assistant to Professor Martha Minow and an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. Mr. Varcoe graduated with honors in 1995 from the University of Chicago, where he was Student Ombudsperson (a mediator, reporting to the President of the University, who investigated and resolved student grievances) and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.